is the ubuntu font still being developed?

The "dalton-maag-expansion" series was supposed to produce Hebrew and Arabic scripts over a year ago; the "phased-beta" was supposed to be completed by November 2011... There have been no releases of any kind, in any series, during 2012.
Has the project died?

Good morning Ahmed. In short "when it's ready". I'll try and explain how the process is working, and you're welcome to ask more questions or make suggestions:

There's a couple of ways that we arrange when to release something:

(a) Time-based releases: Ubuntu (the operating system) is released on a time-basis: a speciifc goal date that everyone works towards. Features either make the progressive milestone freeze dates, or miss the release and get bumped to the next.

(b) Feature based: The components that make up the whole of Ubuntu tend to be released in a different way: on a quality, or feature basis. This is true of the Ubuntu Font Family; the intention is that it is widely used and last a long time, so it's worth spending the effort.

You are clearly looking forward to the Arabic coverage in the Ubuntu Font Family, and I so am I, and so are others, and for some of them it is a hobby. In terms of timing, I would not want to mislead you by offering dates: so I'll simply say at this point "when it's ready"; that means when we've managed to get the advanced Arabic featured mostly debugging to the point where people can test it in day-to-day real-world reading (rather than just for layout purposes, where you have the control and can always work around and adjust anything that's not quite right). Once that is done, and any niggles are adusted then the Ubuntu Arabic designed by Rayan Abdullah and implemented by Dalton Maag can be added to the Ubuntu Font Family and released, and subsequently included in a future release of Ubuntu itself.

Dalton Maag have had a couple of other very big projects in the news recently; lots more script coverage in the Nokia Pure set, and then the large Rio 2016 Olympics font. And I just got back to the UK yesterday after being abroad for a while.

Perhaps you could help with finding Arabic script readers with knowledge across several languages (ie Pashto, etc) so that it's easier to pick up and work on the debugging nearer to the time. Would you be able to help do that?

Hallo Beni, the Hebrew hasn't been shippped yet, because the change that brought the changes for the Semitic (Arabic/Hebrew) scripts also changed the line-height, causing regressions and document reflow. There may be a solution to this forth-coming in the next few months, but we'll have to see what's possible, or whether it might be better to ship the Semitic coverage as a separate .tff